The present invention relates to the field of medical lab equipment. In particular the present invention discloses a fully automated system for staining tissue specimens and cell preparations.
It is often difficult to examine unstained cell and tissue preparations with a microscope due to a lack of contrast between individual cells and the background matrix, or between individual parts of cells. To improve the contrast, researchers have applied stains to cell and tissue specimens to be examined. The stains are absorbed differently by the various structures in cells such that the contrast between the different cell structures is improved.
Staining tissue specimens is a nontrivial time-consuming process. Often a number of different staining and rinsing stages are required. Each stage requires a specific amount of reagent or buffer and takes a specific amount of time. Thus, trained technicians are often employed to perform such operations. Furthermore, hospitals and laboratories must stain large numbers of tissue specimens. Thus, it is desirable to automate the tissue specimen staining process. By automating the process, expensive human labor is eliminated and the probability of an error occurring during the staining process is reduced. Accordingly, a few manufacturers have introduced equipment for the automated staining of tissue specimens on microscope slides.
Existing automatic staining devices are not very simple to use. Arcane programming commands and complicated procedures require extensive user training before such devices can be operated effectively. It would therefore be desirable to simplify the operation of an automatic staining device.
The present invention comprises an automatic staining apparatus coupled to a personal computer system running an operating system with a graphical user interface. The personal computer system includes an interface card that is used to control the automatic staining apparatus. An autostainer control program runs on the personal computer system. The autostainer control program allows a user to simply program the automatic staining apparatus using simple commands entered in the graphical user interface. The autostainer control program also includes a Stat function that allows the user to interrupt the routine staining of slides in order to prioritize processing of one or more slides that require immediate analysis. The invention simplifies the process of programming an automatic staining apparatus to include staining of stat slides.